Two Camps In USA Today

The world is now divided into two camps: those who have no jobs and can afford very little, who travel rarely, if ever, and are seldom seen on airliners or cruise ships or in taxi cabs, legitimate theaters and four star restaurants, have recently lost their homes or have never owned one, buy everything they need at Walmart, Food For Less and garage sales, and those who are receiving money each month from gainful employment, annuities or trust funds inheritance, who populate crowds at airline terminals, hotels and concerts, who shop at department stores, buy iPads, iPhones, hybrid cars and private vintage wines, pay mortgages or live in moderately priced apartments in the better neighborhoods, dine with fashionably-coifed friends on patios outside trendy restaurants and complain about toxicity of genetically modified food, cell phone radiation and municipal water supplies.

I lost it at Lindbergh field last night. The irony of that name reflects everything about the denouement of San Diego from a desirable place to live to Las Vegas by the sea. Every opportunity of graceful living in San Diego has been usurped for exploitation by tourism and in the process, transformed into something unlovely and false yet pricey. Meanwhile, middle class consumers in the thronging crowd attending departures and arrivals at the international airport mill around, like nervous cattle in chutes leading to the slaughter house, uttering an occasional moan of complaint but don’t really get it. Unlike their counterparts in rural places, those who live in places like southern California are oblivious to material conditions in which they live, nor that they would be far better off back in Tennessee, Milwaukee, Lincoln or the places in Viet Nam, the Philippines, Korea or Guatemala that they or their parents or grandparents left to come to the land of opportunity. Finally, as that opportunity is revealed as illusory, a trick to lure them into coming here to add to the volume of consumers, in places in the middle east, people are realizing that it is a better plan to overthrow regimes that suppress opportunity there rather than trying to find it elsewhere. Meanwhile, unawakened multitudes stand in queues to be hustled by other wage-earners into aluminum tubes, like cattle.